Brazil Senate votes to impeach president

BRASÍLIA - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was suspended Thursday to face impeachment, ceding power to her vice-president-turned-enemy Michel Temer in a political earthquake ending 13 years of leftist rule over Latin America’s biggest nation.

A nearly 22-hour debate in the Senate closed with an overwhelming 55-22 vote against Brazil’s first female president. Pro-impeachment senators broke into applause and posed for selfies and congratulatory group photos in the blue-carpeted, circular chamber.

Only a simple majority of the 81-member Senate had been required to suspend Rousseff for six months pending judgment on charges that she broke budget accounting laws. A trial could now take months, with a two-thirds majority vote eventually needed to force Rousseff, 68, from office altogether.

Within hours, Temer, from the centre-right PMDB party, was to take over as interim president, drawing the curtain on more than a decade of dominance by Rousseff’s leftist Workers’ Party.

She was expected to go to her official residence where she will continue to live with her mother during the impeachment trial. She will retain her salary and bodyguards.

The leader of the Workers’ Party in the Senate, Humberto Costa, said his side would now work to convince senators to support Rousseff in the trial and turn the tide in her favor.

- Battered by multiple crises -

Due to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in less than three months, Brazil is struggling to stem economic disarray and handle the fallout from a corruption scandal reaching deep into the political and business elite.

The latest target of a sprawling probe into the graft was Senator Aecio Neves, who narrowly lost to Rousseff in the 2014 presidential elections - and who was one of the senators voting to impeach Rousseff. The Supreme Court authorized a probe into his alleged bribe taking and money laundering overnight.

The multiple crises have wreaked havoc on the Workers’ Party, whose transformative social programs have lifted tens of millions of people from poverty since 2003, but which has been portrayed as increasingly incapable of governing.

Senate President Renan Calheiros, who oversaw the proceedings, told reporters that impeachment would be “traumatic.”

And divisions were plain to see outside Congress, where police erected a giant metal fence to keep apart small rival groups of demonstrators. Riot police pepper sprayed a group of Rousseff supporters late Wednesday and pro- and anti-impeachment protesters also scuffled briefly in Rio.

Even though the impeachment vote came in the middle of the night, residents in central Sao Paulo - Brazil’s financial center and an opposition stronghold - set off fire crackers, banged pots and yelled “Dilma out!” from their windows.

Senators made their cases in 15-minute blocks, alternately describing Rousseff as the cause of Brazil’s humiliating economic decline or defending her as victim of a coup in a deeply corrupt political system.